Count on Keselowski to fight for his place in NASCAR

No one should be surprised at the confrontation between Brad Keselowski and Denny Hamlin earlier this year at Lowe’s Motor Speedway, because in a lot of ways, Keselowski has been fighting for respect all his life.
 
Or just simply fighting.
 
The youngest of five children born to Bob and Kay Keselowski, Brad has always been looking up the ladder. When he was younger, he had to contend with bullies who were bigger.
 
And now, as Dale Earnhardt Jr.’s lone full-time Nationwide Series driver, Keselowski is battling the big, bad Sprint Cup drivers every week.
 
There is a difference, of course. Lessons learned from fighting battles the wrong way help Keselowski seem mature beyond his years, as when he was applauded for handling the fallout from the dustup with Hamlin.
 
It wasn’t always that way for the 24-year-old from Rochester Hills, Mich. Seems he was simply an easy target for boys his age.
 
“He’s always been very small,” Kay Keselowski said recently. “It wasn’t until his junior or senior year [of high school] that he got height to him. He was this little scrawny kid and people picked on him a lot.”
 
One way Brad handled the harassment was to snap back with his wit.

“At the time he wasn’t strong enough to do anything physically, so basically it was verbal and intellectual,” Kay said. “It’s hard to fight that when someone comes back with something you really can’t refute. That’s how he handled it.”
 
Well, that’s one way he handled it.
 
“I’m not going to lie: I was not the greatest kid in school,” Brad admitted. “I handled a lot of other situations like that when I was younger very poorly, very poorly.
 
“I had a little bit of a Napoleon complex. I didn’t take to bullying very well, that’s for sure. I was the kid that if the bully picked on me, I took a swing at him. You can relate that to life now however you want to look at it, but that’s who I was back then. I never responded to it very well, that’s for sure.”
 
Keselowski was even kicked out of school for fighting, but that didn’t stop him – even when confronting kids much bigger than he was.
 
“Oh, yeah, definitely,” Keselowski said. “I remember one guy who was probably twice my size.”
 
Over time, though, the fighting stopped. Keselowski learned there were better ways to handle certain situations.
 
“It was the experiences that I had from that, and of course the repercussions that came with them, that probably taught me how to deal with it at a later age,” Keselowski said. “There are two paths you can go down: You can be a fighter the rest of your life, or you can learn from your mistakes. I learned from it.”
 
Getting suspended from school was one of the repercussions.
 
“That’s part of the learning process,” Keselowski said. “You could go either way with that. You can get kicked out of school and get in trouble and develop that mentality to where you’re right, or you can step back and look at it and say, ‘Maybe I was wrong.’
 
“I have the opinion now that I was wrong back then.”
 
Being scrappy does have its merits, however. Keselowski isn’t a driver who will simply back down when Cup regulars race him in the Nationwide Series.
 
Perhaps some of that mentality came from playing “lightweight” football in Michigan. Instead of one age group, certain ages were split into two weight classes. And since Keselowski was smaller than kids his age, he played in the “lightweight” class.
 
The upper weight limit was 115 pounds, while Keselowski weighed a lithe 72.
 
But he wasn’t a defensive back or wide receiver or even a kicker, positions usually manned by smaller players.
 
“I was best on the line,” Keselowski said. “I was always a gouger.”
 
He still is. The difference is he’s learned how to harness his energy, how to keep in his anger.
 
Watching races on television with his family when he was younger, Brad would see a driver bad-mouth another driver after a wreck – but before seeing a replay.
 
His father, Bob, was a driver, too, and told Brad that sometimes it’s not always so simple from the driver’s seat.
 
Earlier this year at The Milwaukee Mile, Keselowski was bumped out of the lead by Joey Logano, damaging Keselowski’s No. 88 Chevrolet and ruining a chance at victory.
 
Keselowski refused to criticize Logano, however. He wanted to make sure he saw the replay first.
 
Plus, Keselowski ended up finishing eighth that night. It wasn’t that long ago that finishing eighth in a race in NASCAR’s No. 2 series would have been an impossible dream.
 
Before landing the ride with JR Motorsports, Keselowski drove for the underfunded, undermanned Keith Coleman Racing team. Simply making the race was the weekly goal.
 
“That gives you an appreciation for the other side,” Keselowski said. “Who cares what happened? I had a great run.”
 
And there’s more appreciation for being with one of the series’ best teams. Starting off in quarter-midgets when he was younger, Bob Keselowski made sure Brad worked on his equipment.
 
“My husband’s real big thing is, ‘You need to know what makes these things work. You need to know how hard it is to fix them,’” Kay Keselowski said.
 
That helped Brad’s reputation for being easy on equipment.
 
“He has a real appreciation for that because he knows what it’s like to have to fix them,” Kay said. “He knows what it takes, not only physically, to fix them, but monetarily. He has a real feel for that and a real respect for that.”
 
The respect issue has come up more than once with Keselowski, including a criticism from Earnhardt Jr. earlier this year that his driver was losing respect for the people around him.
 
That doesn’t seem to be the case now.
 
“There’s definitely a level of appreciation that comes from having a circle of people that are basically fighting to make me famous,” Keselowski said. “There’s a high level of appreciation that comes from that. There’s a high level of appreciation for having a sponsor, because I know how hard it is to get one. I’m very lucky to have that.”
 
Lucky? Perhaps.
 
But at least now he knows he has a fighting chance.